1810

1810: Schooling

In this year

Spent a short period of time in a school for infants with a "teaching mother", (according to a story handed down in the family, it was a Marie Raaschou). Attended another school for infants in the same year, run by Fedder Carstens. This school was especially for Jewish children. It was here that HCA got to know a little Jewish girl by the name of Sara Heimann, who seems to have become a model for the character Naomi in the novel Kun en Spillemand (Only a Fiddler!). This school was closed by 1811 and it seems probable that HCA then attended the charity school for a period, but there is no hard evidence to this effect. At home, HCA improves his reading abilities and in the coming years he embarks upon Holberg's comedies, which had already been read aloud to him by his father. Later, he also tackles Shakespeare (although it can not be determined how much of this he read during childhood). More than anyone, it is his father who stimulates his interest in the theatre and his intellectual development. During HCA's adolescence, his mother's folk-based superstition is balanced by the religious rationalism and intellectual curiosity of his father.